Unix and Linux → Having issues mounting a USB drive.

I had a windows computer "die" on me. Well it's still sorta works, just a pain in the butt to get it started because of a blown cap on the mother board.

Anyhow, I pulled that hard drive, it has windows Vista on it, and stuck it into a USB enclosure. Thinking I could just hook it up and grab the files. I could swear I've done that in the past, but this time it's not allowing me to mount the drive. It's telling me that I need to place it in a windows machine and run chkdsk/f on it.

Could I just stick it in my Linux box as a second hard drive? would that work?
Or will I actually have to find a vista machine to do a chkdsk/f on it?

It would work so long as the Linux box can read NTFS filesystems.

If your linux box is actually telling you to run a chkdsk on the USB drive, then I would have to say that it is indeed mounted and being seen by the system. Your problem now though, is that Linux can't run a chkdsk and that your disk drive has issues.

Why couldn't he use Disk Utility? Mine (Ubuntu 12.04) will view Smart data and run self-tests, even offers the option to check and repair file system. Obviously NTFS is supported here, that's easily done. I'd give it a try, just make sure it's out of the boot sequence.

Can't hurt.

Internal drive or external USB drive -- that should not make any difference.

You should try manually mounting it with the "mount" command. And be sure to use "-o ro" when you try that. It is usually possible to mount a corrupt file system as read-only, though you might get some errors reading files.

I'll give that a whirl.

This is just anecdote, but I've seen Ubuntu complain about NTFS formatted USB drives that where not properly unmounted. Sticking them on Windows box and then unmounting them did the trick.

K.

this.
the other (anecdotal) downside i saw was the inability to mount the drive unless the specific chkdsk was done on the drive. i guess that a poweroff after the chkdsk had occurred (or was flagged on the drive) prevented the successful unmount of the drive.

this was done in vmware using virtual harddrives -- so i could have been fighting more than just the bare metal.

q.